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Global Prehumanisms Conference at Illinois

The Global Prehumanisms conference on October 18-20 brought together scholars in a variety of disciplines and institutions to discuss how the premodern world offers ways to decenter humanity and rethink our relationship to the environment. The conference opened on Thursday night with a plenary lecture by Peggy McCracken, sponsored by the Illinois Project for Research in the Humanities. In a brilliant talk, McCracken discussed representations of the Pygmalion story in late medieval French and Middle English manuscript manuscripts and illustrations, exploring how the ivory material of Pygmalion’s statue relates to conceptions of animacy, humanity, and materiality, as well as to late medieval commercial networks. It offered a thought-provoking introduction to the conference, while touching on a variety of issues that would be explored in papers and conversation over the next two days.

Friday morning began with a panel on “Decentering the Human.” Aylin Malcolm explored the categorization of fish in late medieval Christian sources, which frequently present fish as exemplary for their human qualities. Her careful analysis demonstrated how medieval taxonomies often do not reflect our contemporary categories – an idea that was taken up in the Q&A and throughout the rest of the conference. Next, Gian Piero Persiani described the shift in Japanesewaka poetry from human-centered to landscape-centered poems, as reflected in the work of eleventh-century critic Fujiwara Kintō, who accorded the highest honors to poems that represented a concrete landscape and eschewed overt emotion words. Jackie Fay rounded out the panel by discussing the dynamic, interactive nature of genitals in the Old English Riddles and in medical texts, raising a host of fascinating questions about how Anglo-Saxons understood themselves in relation to nature.

The second session showcased thought-provoking work in critical plant studies. Shannon Kelley described the complex treatment of weeping women who become trees in Early Modern England, focusing in particular on the character of Myrrha in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Erin Sweany presented the complex role of plants in the Old English charms, noting their efficacy as actors that produce changes while also offering caution about the limits of what we can argue from our evidence. Finally, Verena Höfig surveyed Norse material on the Brísingamen, Freyja’s famous necklace, and proposed that her necklace was likely a girdle used to aid in pregnancy, made of floating seeds like those that often washed up on the shore of Iceland. The evening closed with Anne Harris’ meditation on Brueghel’s vision of the tower of Babel, and Babel as a model of prehuman possibilities in a posthuman world. Harris pushed back on readings of Babel as a simple morality tale, instead seeing the tower as both hyper-object and emblem of the Anthropocene, and weaving it into meditations on race, climate change, technology, and the future of the humanities.

Saturday began with a panel on Nature and Longing. Elizabeth Sutton explored the ecologies of wheat-weaving in Norway and the colonial U.S. Maria Slautina described the importation of rocks from China into Japan, and how the recontextualization of these rocks accorded them a degree of agency that challenges contemporary anthropocentric ideas about landscape. Peter Buchanan surveyed the uses of stale urine in the Old English medical texts and riddles, commenting on what its uses suggest both about Anglo-Saxon understandings of themselves and about contemporary nostalgia for a non-existent past.

The final session on Saturday explored Landscapes and Soundscapes. Nancy McLoughlin discussed how a thirteenth-century French poem explores humanity’s engagement with Avarice as entanglement with a “hyper-object” that exceeds human comprehension and tied the poem’s discussion into a meditation on contemporary climate change. Mikhaila Redovian analyzed John Donne’s poems “The Primrose” and “Twickenham Garden,” arguing that their engagement with early modern ideas of the natural world allow us to recontextualize Donne as a nature poet for his time. Finally, Joshua Groffman imagined the soundscape of the Hudson Valley before colonization, incorporating textual references, musical history, and contemporary recording technology to imagine the pre-human landscape. Throughout, the conference invited participants to make interdisciplinary connections and raised questions about taxonomy, collaboration, and possibilities in a posthuman age.